FLIGHT FROM ALCATRAZ

A LOUD METALLIC BANG fractured the quiet night as the rain shroud over the ventilator shaft came loose and was shoved upward onto the roof. Three denim-clad men popped up through the shaft one by one and cautiously surveyed the nighttime scene. For the first time in months, they saw the moon as it rose from the eastern hills of Marin County, Calif.

The flat surface under their feet was the roof of the U.S. Federal Penitentiary at Alcatraz, and the twinkling city lights to the west were San Francisco. Whether the men ever saw the moon again or the city lights after that night is one of the most intriguing questions in American penal history.

The unsolved mystery is now 31 years old.

It was about 11 p.m. on June 11, 1962, when the three men, Frank Lee Morris and two brothers from Florida, Clarence and John W. Anglin, left the roof at Alcatraz. They had spent months scheming and working out the details of their escape route and survival in San Francisco Bay.

In full view of the guard tower to the south, they scurried north across the open roof and climbed down a flue pipe leading from the prison bakery to the ground. Two cyclone fences topped with barbed wire were the last hurdles. From there it was an easy descent to the grassy slopes and rocks at the edge of the famous bay.

The water temperature was 52 degrees, and the winds were light from the southwest. The tide was ebbing from the bay under the Golden Gate Bridge at 2.7 knots. The nearest land was sparsely populated Angel Island to the north and San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf to the west, both about one and a quarter miles from Alcatraz.

But the men were ready. They had made a raft from rubberized raincoats and paddles from chair legs. They had life jackets and the names of outside contacts. Sometime around 11:30 p.m., they slipped into the chilly water and disappeared.

Pandemonium broke out the next morning when guards discovered dummy heads in the cell bunks of the missing men. A massive air and sea search was conducted over the next 10 days. On June 14, a Coast Guard cutter picked up a paddle about 200 yards off Angel Island. On the same day, workers on another boat found a wallet wrapped in plastic that contained photos and names connected to J.W. Anglin.

On June 21, raincoat material was found on a beach not far from the Golden Gate Bridge that was believed to have been part of a homemade life jacket. The next day a prison boat picked up a deflated life jacket made from the same material, just 50 yards from the island prison.

But no bodies were ever recovered, and no other physical evidence of the escapees' fate was ever found.

The three men had simply vanished.

THE 12-ACRE ISLAND OF Alcatraz, with its forbidding concrete walls and steel bars, was conceived as a maximum-custody federal prison in 1934 by then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Aside from the Anglin brothers and Morris - and two other escapees presumed drowned in 1937 - none of the 36 does that number include the three? prisoners who attempted it ever escaped "The Rock" in the 29 years it existed as a prison.

The file on the 1962 escape remains open, and a reward of $5,000 is still offered for one itinerant, intelligent robber and two high-spirited Florida farm boys. They have been the subject of books, movies and television shows, and more than one million people a year visit Alcatraz, now part of the National Park system.

Rachel and George Robert Anglin and their 13 children first arrived in the tiny agricultural town of Ruskin, Fla., 20 miles south of Tampa, in the early '40s. They were seasonal farm workers from southern Georgia who found Ruskin's truck farms and tomato fields a source of regular income. Still, they were always short of money, and every June they would move north as far as Michigan to pick cherries.

Three of the Anglin sons, Alfred, Clarence and John W. (better known as J.W.), were inseparable as youngsters. They worked barefoot in the fields, rode bikes and swam in the Little Manatee River near Ruskin. On trips north, their brothers and sisters were amazed to see the three boys break the ice in a Georgia pond for a swim.

"They were good swimmers and would swim in Lake Michigan in late May and early June when there was still ice," recalls their older brother, Robert Jr., who lives in Ruskin with his sister, Audrey Bazemore, and her husband, not far from where their childhood home once stood.

The Anglin brothers grew into handsome, energetic young men, independent and impatient for a better life. With adulthood came adult desires: cars, clothes, girls. But there was little money to be earned in the canning plants around Tampa, where they sometimes worked.

Teenage mischief evolved into petty larcency - stolen tires and tractor batteries, breaking and entering. They hot-wired cars and went joy-riding. Clarence, the youngest, earned his first conviction at age 14 and spent a year at the State Industrial School for Boys in Marianna, a tiny town in the Florida Panhandle. J.W. teamed up with Clarence a short time later in a store burglary, which landed both in the Industrial School for another year.

By the early '50s the breaking-and-entering offenses carried adult penalties and both Clarence and Alfred wound up with four-year sentences at the state prison in Raiford. J.W. drew a two-year sentence there for grand larceny in 1951.

From 1951 to 1957, Clarence and Alfred escaped from every Florida prison and road camp they were sent to, including those in Indian Town, Fort Myers, West Palm Beach, Pompano Beach, Perry and Floral City.

"Once Clarence escaped from Perry and swam across the Suwanee River," remembers his brother, Robert Jr. "Another time he and a guy sawed through the wood floor at Floral City and was shot in the shoulder going over a fence."

J.W. served his sentence at Raiford and returned to Ruskin in 1953, vowing to go straight. But in 1958 the brothers got together at a cabin J.W. had rented outside Tampa and planned the biggest crime of their lives.

They would rob a bank.

The brothers picked the Bank of Columbia in Columbia, Ala., a small town in the southeast corner of the state. Their sister, Audrey, 68, remembers that Alfred had once stayed with an uncle in nearby Ashford and probably knew the bank would be a pushover. It had never been robbed in 100 years.

J.W. stayed in the getaway car, his own Ford convertible, while Clarence and Alfred held the bank's three employees at bay with a toy pistol.

The take was $19,000 in cash and traveler's checks. After making a brief detour to Ruskin, the brothers headed north again to Hamilton, Ohio, where Alfred's wife and J.W.'s married girlfriend were staying with the girlfriend's father.

But the authorities were tipped off, and five days after the bank robbery on Jan. 22, 1958, police surrounded the house in Hamilton and arrested the three brothers.

The following month the trio pleaded guilty in federal court in Montgomery. Alfred, who had been a fugitive for six years, and Clarence, at large for about a year, were each sentenced to 15 years, while J.W., the getaway driver, got 10 years. All three were sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

But there was more. On March 14, the boys were tried for the bank holdup under Alabama state law, and were surprised to learn they faced a possible death sentence because of their records.

The prosecutor called for the death penalty to punish these boys from Florida who had come over to rob the good people in Alabama," their sister recalls.

Instead of death, the boys received 25 years each, to be served after their federal prison terms.

After a few weeks, the prison authorities decided that Alfred was an escape risk and transferred him to Leavenworth, Kansas. J.W. soon followed, while Alfred remained in Atlanta.

Then, in 1960, Clarence tried to smuggle J.W. out of Leavenworth in a breadbox. The plan was risky, but might have worked if a supervisor hadn't noticed workers struggling to lift the heavy, modified box onto a truck bound for an outside camp.

J.W. was transferred again, this time to Alcatraz, where he arrived on Oct. 24, 1960. Clarence also was banished to "The Rock," on Jan. 16, 1961, following a letter-smuggling incident.

Alcatraz, a fortress prison dating to the days of the Spanish, had no rehabilitation programs. Designed as an "escape-proof" facility for incorrigibles, high-escape risks and powerful gangsters, it had housed some of America's most notorious criminals, including Machine Gun Kelly, Doc Barker and Al Capone.

Confident in his prison's security, the warden placed the Anglin brothers next to each other on B-Block in cells 150 and 152. A few cells down was Frank Morris in cell 138 and next to him was Allen West, the fourth member of the escape conspiracy, in cell 140.

Like his three associates, West had a long record of arrests dating to 1944 involving nonviolent crimes, the most common being auto theft. Morris had arrived at Alcatraz in January 1960 from Atlanta where he had known at least one of the Anglin brothers. He was serving time for bank robbery and had already escaped from 11 institutions.

Morris, 34, had an IQ of 140 and over the years had developed drafting and mechanical skills.

NO ONE KNOWS WHICH OF THE FOUR men devised the escape plan, but once conceived, they worked together like a crack commando unit, right under the noses of round-the-clock guards. The average number of prisoners on a given day at Alcatraz in 1962 was 260. They were supervised by 150 correctional officers working three shifts on appointed schedules and routines that included 12 head counts per day.

Yet these four men worked undetected in their cells for almost a year, and later in the utility corridor and on top of the cellblock for several weeks. They used and concealed tools and construction materials despite cell shakedowns, even when their work, albeit disguised, was in full view.

First they enlarged the rectangular vent holes at the back of their cells. The concrete wall was three inches thick, with a recessed grating cemented into the back portion of the six-inch-high-by-10-inch-wide vent opening. Their main tools were two star-tipped drills and spoon handles modified as wedges.

Using a shoe heel, they softly tapped the drills into the wall, then pried chunks of concrete loose with the spoon-handle wedges, until they had enlarged the hole to about 11-by-17 inches.

Dummy vent grills and coverings were constructed with art supplies and putty and used to conceal the work in progress. After months of tedious tapping, chipping and prying, Morris and the Anglin brothers broke through and began concealing equipment and material in the utility space. West, who had the best cell for a lookout post, began to make the rafts and life preservers, using do-it-yourself instructions from Popular Mechanics, which featured an article titled, "Your Life Preserver - How Will It Behave When You Need It?" The ingenuity, however, was self-supplied: a makeshift pump for blowing up the rafts; paddles made from chair legs; the acquisition of enough prison raincoats to make two rafts using the sleeves sewn together as pontoons.

Once inside the utility corridor, Clarence Anglin and Morris began to explore the route to the roof. Climbing the scaffolding and pipes was easy, but when they reached the old air vent to the roof the plan took on new complications. Not only was the top of the cell block exposed to observation, the vent shaft was blocked by steel bars riveted into a metal ring.

More resourcefulness would be required.

West, who had a job in the prison as a painter, talked a supervisor into letting him do some cleaning and painting on the upper cellblock. To minimize the amount of dirt and old paint falling to the cellblock floor, he would need some blankets, he told the supervisor.

Incredibly, West obtained 80 blankets and draped them over the bars to conceal the escape work as Morris and Clarence cut through the soft metal bolts that fastened the hard metal ring with the steel bars to the shaft. When the time came, they would push the whole ring, bars and all, up the shaft and out, along with the metal rain shroud on top.

Meanwhile, the Anglins and West made realistic dummy heads, complete with human hair and eyebrows salvaged by Clarence, who had a job in the prison barber shop. At night, with cell lights off, the heads looked real enough to pass cursory head-count inspection.

ALLEN WEST NEVER MADE IT OFF the island with the others. He had never entirely broken through his vent hole. The plan was for him to kick out the last remaining inch of concrete the night of the escape.

On June 11, West lay in his bunk after hearing Morris slide from his cell and ascend to the roof. At about 10:30 he heard a loud bang. A guard working the 4-to-midnight shift heard it too - along with two other bangs that seemed to be coming from the hospital or dining-room areas. The guard called a lieutenant, who called another guard, and they conducted a 40-minute inspection. But the sounds had ceased, and everything was reported normal.

West knew the sound was the vent shroud tumbling onto the roof. Morris came back for him, kicking at the vent hole, but something was wrong. A piece of re-inforcement rod was holding some concrete in place. Morris tried briefly to help, then disappeared. Clarence Anglin came back and tried to assist but to no avail.

West finally managed to break through about 1 a.m. He climbed to the cellblock roof and discovered a paddle and pontoon had been left for him, meaning the other convicts had reconfigured two rafts into one, for the three of them.

But the other prisoners were long gone, and as he started to follow their path north along the roof a guard took up a position on the water tower catwalk, directly in line with his planned descent down the bakery flue pipe. West waited for the guard to move, he later told prison investigators, but the guard never did.

As the sun began to rise out of the hills, West climbed back down to his cell and waited for the inevitable.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN RUSKIN, the FBI came calling at the Anglin home.

"They wanted to talk to me and Daddy separately," says Robert Jr. "Had we seen them, heard from them? Would we call if we did and let them know?"

Robert smiled at the FBI men and said sure he would. His older brother, Rufus, was not so polite.

"If I knew anything I wouldn't be stupid enough to tell you," he told an agent.

J.W., Clarence and Alfred had never confided the details of their criminal activity to family members.

"When I visited Alfred in prison and asked him why they did it he always said, 'I don't know,'" recalls Audrey.

By the time his brothers escaped from Alcatraz, Alfred had been transferred from the federal prison in Atlanta to serve his state sentence in Kilby Prison at Montgomery, Ala.

"He said he knew they'd made it," Audrey says. "He said he would find them if he could get out of prison."

He never got the chance.

On Jan. 11, 1964, Alfred was electrocuted by a high-tension wire while he was attempting to escape.

Alfred's body was returned to Ruskin for burial. His mother, Rachel, died in 1973, and the Anglins say they are certain the FBI attended both funerals. While prison officials closed the books on Clarence and J.W. as "presumed drowned" in 1962, the FBI maintains that the boys are still alive.

If they are, J.W. would be 63 now and Clarence 62.

The escape has brought the Anglin family some notoriety. Clint Eastwood portrayed Frank Morris in the 1979 movie, Escape From Alcatraz. It took considerable liberties with the facts, however, and relegated J.W. and Clarence to minor roles.

Another surge of interest came with an episode of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries that first aired in 1989 and has been rerun three times. And next month, Fox TV's America's Most Wanted will air a one-hour special that producers say offers a fresh look at how Morris and the Anglins escaped and what they planned to do afterward.

Riddle of the Rock, a book written by California writer Don DeNevi and published in 1991, offers the most sympathetic portrayal of the Anglin brothers.

DeNevi interviewed every member of the Anglin family, tape-recording hours of interviews.

When three of the family members, Robert Jr., Marie and Jeanette Williams, Alfred's widow, visited Alcatraz for the first time last year, they stayed at DeNevi's home in San Francisco. (George Robert Anglin Sr., the boys' father, died in 1989 at age 92.)

"It was weird looking in at their cells," Robert says. "The guides wouldn't let us go inside them, but they did take us up on the roof to show us how J.W. and Clarence escaped."

To this day, guards who were in charge at the time of the escape are reluctant to discuss the incident. How could these men chip and drill, make dummies and rafts, scurry up the scaffolding in the utility corridor and cut through bolts in a roof ventilator without being detected?

One man who might have ended the mystery died in a Florida prison in 1978. Allen West, proud of his role as the fourth member of the team, described the escape to authorities in 1962 but never revealed the exact details of how it was accomplished.

One reason for the success of the plan may have been lax security.

A plan to close Alcatraz was well under way in 1961, the year before the escape. The prison had become expensive to operate and needed extensive repairs.

Officials speculate that, by the time of the escape in June 1962, morale among the guards who would lose their jobs or be transferred elsewhere may have slipped, along with security.

The Anglin family clings to the belief that Clarence and J.W. Anglin survived their escape.

"I've always thought they made it, although there's no proof," says Audrey Bazemore. "If they didn't, why were their bodies never found?"

Mysterious postcards, Christmas cards and late-night phone calls have been received by the Anglin family over the years from unknown sources, but no one has ever been able to prove they came from either J.W. or Clarence.

Seven years after they disappeared without a trace, an insurance company recognized the two men as officially dead and paid off their life insurance policies, Audrey says.

AS FOR ALCATRAZ, IT COULDN'T escape its own misfortunes. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the old fortress shut down, and on March 21, 1963, the prison boat made its last trip to the mainland with prisoners.

The island was unoccupied except by a caretaker until 1969, when a band of militant Indians claimed it. They too abandoned the rock after a few months. In 1973, the island was incorporated into the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1973 and is, among other things, a bird sanctuary. The Red and White Fleet, which has the tour concession from the National Park Service, charges $8 a person for its Alcatraz excursion, making numerous round-trips each day from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.

Last year, when the Anglin siblings visited the island for the first time, tour operators and Park Service rangers gave them special attention. Seeing where it all happened simply reinforced the family's faith that the brothers may have made it after all.

"We know they can't tell us where they're at," says Rufus Anglin, 73. "But we'd sure like to see them again."

"Maybe they have their own families and have simply forgotten about us," concludes Robert Jr. "I'd be satisfied just to know they made it."

-- JIM KERR is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to Sunshine.